UN races to get food to hungry Somali refugees

DOLO, Somalia — The U.N. will airlift emergency rations this week to parts of drought-ravaged Somalia that militants banned it from more than two years ago — a crisis intervention to keep hungry refugees from dying along what an official calls the “roads of death.”

The foray into the famine zone is a desperate attempt to reach at least 175,000 of the 2.2 million Somalis whom aid workers have not yet been able to help.

Tens of thousands already have trekked to neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia, hoping to get aid in refugee camps.

S. African man wakes after 21 hours in morgue fridge

JOHANNESBURG — A South African man awoke to find himself in a morgue fridge — nearly a day after his family thought he had died, a health official said Monday.

Health department spokesman Sizwe Kupelo said the man awoke Sunday afternoon, 21 hours after his family called in an undertaker who sent him to the morgue after an asthma attack.

Morgue owner Ayanda Maqolo said he sent his driver to collect the body shortly after the family reported the death. Maqolo said he thought the man was around 80 years old.

“When he got there, the driver examined the body, checked his pulse, looked for a heartbeat, but there was nothing,” Maqolo told the Associated Press.

A day after staff put the body into a locked refrigerated compartment, morgue workers heard someone shouting for help. They thought it was a ghost, the morgue owner said.

“I couldn’t believe it!” Maqolo said. “I was also scared. But they are my employees and I had to show them I wasn’t scared, so I called the police.”

After police arrived, the group entered the morgue together.

Maqolo said the man was pale when they pulled him out. “He asked, ‘How did I get here?’”

The health department said the man was then taken to a nearby hospital for observation and later discharged by doctors who deemed him stable.

Atom smasher closes in on elusive particle

GRENOBLE, France — Physicists expect the world’s largest atom smasher to find a long-sought theoretical new particle — or rule out that it exists — by the end of 2012.

Rolf Heuer, director of the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, told reporters at a major physics conference that new research at the $10 billion collider under the Swiss-French border has helped pinpoint the precise level of high energy where the new particle is expected to be found.

The Higgs boson is the linchpin of the standard model of particle physics that explains the Big Bang theory, and is believed to give mass to other other objects and creatures in the universe.